Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Amazon Key door-entry flaw: No easy fix to stop rogue couriers burgling your place unseen

Re: Insurance

One of the few things it specifically excludes is damage by people you invite into your house..

Otherwise known as the Dracula clause...

$232m blockchain startup Tezos faces sueballs for alleged investor fraud

Re: Backward causation

Nope.

The SEC decision isn't legally binding, but applies to existing securities law. Basically they had a long investitgation and decided that current law already applies to ICOs that they quack and waddle like securities and therefore are. However they've just paid some lawyers to do that. This has not yet been tested in court. I guess this current case could be the one that sets that precedent.

If the people issuing ICOs didn't do their legal due-dilligence, and have to hand back all the money then tough. They're all probably scams anyway, so I'm sure the money's already disappeared.

How about that time Russian military used a video game pic as proof of US aiding ISIS?

Re: medieval terror-bastards - thumbs up on that one!

What happens when the remnants of ISIS merge with the remnants of SCO?

They won't be in Iraq or Syria anymore, so get shortened back to IS, then added to SCO. Giving us SCOIS. That doom-laden acronym that tells us SCO will be with us FOREVERRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr......

Re: Jesus Toast

Of course Jesus-toast is fake! Greggs have only recently revealed the truth with their advent calendar picture of the shepherds worshipping the sausage roll in the manger.

What more evidence do you need!?!?

Re: The worrying thing...

That's sort of what they have done. Not that it's a formal alliance, or anything close to one. But Syria welcomed allowed Al Qaeda into the border territories with Iraq during the insurgency after the war in 2003. That was how they smuggled in fighters and suicide bombers - particularly as it borders the Sunni West of Iraq where AQ were strongest.

ISIS are a weird coalition of ex-AQ people and a bunch of Saddam's ex military guys, plus extra religious nutters.

So they quickly took Eastern Syria when the civil war started, because Assad concentrated all his fire on the "more moderate" rebels, who tended to be more associated with the Muslim Brotherhood (started in Egypt but now include groups like Hizbollah, Hamas).

So when Russia, Syria and Iran were trying to take back Aleppo for example, they concentrated all their air-strikes on the rebels holding the place, but also attacked them on the other side of the city, where the rebels were also fighting against ISIS - who were essentially a "third side" in the civil war.

Clearly this is a massive over-simplification because there are way more than 3 sides in that civil war, the lot that remained loyal to Al Qaeda for example eventually decided to renounce AQ and changed their name - but were always a part of the "moderate" rebels. Partly I suspect because we mostly didn't arm the rebels (and the Saudis only seriously began to do so later in the war), so AQ were the guys with the guns, the funding and the trained fighters.

Re: medieval terror-bastards - thumbs up on that one!

Surely as ISIS have now been almost kicked out of their strongholds in Iraq and have lost Raqqa in Syria their new name should be TISWAS...

I hope that Chris Tarrant doesn't declare a fatwa on me for this...

Pastry in a manger: We're soz, Greggs man said

Would you believe that some people think the Old Testament is accurate and not a bunch of myths?

If you've ever studied ancient history, you'd know that the Old Testament is a very important source. It suffers from bias of course, but then so does every document you read. It also has the usual problem with sources that straddle the time period of the use of writing - which is that they combine old stories that have probably been told round the fireside for centuries with written records made at the same time as events. so you'll find just as many myths in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, the writings of the Venerable Bede or ancient Greek history.

There's a line in Heredotus' Histories where he says that in Persia there are ants the size of foxes - and I have spoken to people who have actually seen them. This is the reason that he's called "the father of history", for consciously trying to write a history that left out what were thought to be myths, but also known as "the father of lies", because he often failed to do so.

Re: I ain't Spartacus

MJI,

Although I broadly agree with you, you're on pretty dodgy ground assailing the likes of Krispy Kreme for their "sickly diabetes on a plate". At least you are if you're doing it while defending a deep fried sweet bread product that contains jam (about 50% sugar*) and is then covered in more sugar.

*That's for home made jam. Commercial stuff tends to have less fruit, and more sugar - which is going to be especially true for the non-specific "red flavour" jam that tends to lurk inside your average jam doughnut.

Re: I ain't Spartacus

The only true doughnut is the cinnamon-dusted ring (shaddup). All those iced or jam-filled... things are mere cakes and no doughnut at all!

Guards! Seize him!

Burn the heretic!

The one true doughnut is an irregular globular shape and filled with jam and covered in sugar. All others are impostors. After all, it's called a doughnut, not a doughring. I'm sure it's fine if you want to ice them, or add cream, or other such fripperies. I'm even willing to be liberal, and accept that maybe the custard doughnut is not actually a crime against humanity.

There's nothing wrong if you wish to consume a ring doughnut. Iced or covered in cinamon as you wish. Just so long as you accept that yours is an inferior form, and bow to the obvious superiority of The One True Doughnut.

I'd say this isn't a problem for Greggs.

If you go to their head office you'll find a chart, which breaks the population down into two important demographic groups.

1. Potential Customers

2. Potential Ingredients

you can always pull in at a rest stop and pick up a few sausage rolls for lunch while the camels are tanking up.

Have you ever seen a camel? The smelly buggers are grumpy enough already, without getting them drunk!

Re: Grammar!

I once got given a chocolate nativity set for St Nicholas' Day, while working in Belgium. HR got in early and all our desks had speculoos cookies (yum) and choccy shepherds, Marys, Josephs and Jesuses (yum-yum).

As I bit the baby Jesus' head off, I did wonder if this was some weird kind of blasphemy...

Re: Who'd have thought

We've got evidence for the existence of a bloke called Jesus, and the trouble he and his followers caused.

Obviously divinity is a tad more a stretch to prove. But there are multiple contemporaneous ancient sources mentioning him, which is comparitive riches against a lot of figures in ancient history.

Re: While we're on the subject of outrage...

Don't tell anyone, but they use porcuswine. It's terribly hush-hush.

Re: Howay in a manger

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The sausage roll is the food of the Gods! Divinely inspired piggy goodness. The steak bake is nasty cheap meat. Obviously so is the sausage roll, but the advantage of sausages is that's how they're supposed to be.

Their bread pudding and Belgian buns are also superb. However they need to have a serious word with themselves about the doughnuts. The "jam" ones are too doughy, not crispy on the outside, have insufficient jam and are dusted with soft icing sugar instead of crunchy granulated stuff. All wrong! And the less said about selling horrible jam-less ring doughnuts the better...

Had a meeting with the company accountant today. In Greggs. Sausage rolls and Belgian Buns to follow. Yum!

Google says broader right to be forgotten is 'serious assault' on freedom

nijam,

But expiring criminal records is censorship! That's the whole bloody point. It's deliberate forgetfullness by society in order to give people a second chance. Which is why I think serious offences only expire if they occur while the perpetrator is still a minor - you get the chance to grow up and have a clean slate.

In the past printed records still existed, and you could search for them if you wanted to do so. But they weren't available to casual searching, or even anyone but the most determined employer or investigator. But you weren't allowed to re-publish that information.

Those laws were created in an era before the internet, and many of those records became instantly globally searchable. So the answer is that we try to patch the system to keep society working the way we intended it, or we change society to deal with the new realities. Google may squeal, but it's much easier to legally compel them to solve the problem, than to change social attitudes.

To give a lesser example, think of job recruitment. We're in a brief window of social change where the pepole doing the recruting are probably in their 30s and older - but often have access to the Facebook records of people who were teens when they had FB accounts. Hence there's a risk of a bit of sneaky research on potential employees getting them disqualified as a non-serious party-animals for stuff they got up to (and posted) when they were 17. And very drunk. Probably this problem goes away in 15 years, when the people in HR doing the recruiting have their own dodgy FB background to compare with those they're looking at. Whereas what people of my generation did when teenagers could only be recorded on film cameras, and if you were that drunk you probably didn't remember to process the film - in the unlikely event you'd taken a camera out with you.

So the question is, do we hope this is a minor problem and ignore it, or make a law that makes it illegal for HR to demand people's Facebook passwords?

Basically the intervention of new tech changes society in unexpected ways. But people tend to form their expectations of what's reasonable when quite young, and we're not all that good (or fast) at changing them. So sometimes you have to force society to change with laws, or you may have to use a legal sticking-plaster to give people a chance to catch up emotionally with what technology has suddenly made possible.

ratfox,

It's an awkward compromise. This is simply society slowly catching up with technological progress.

Newspapers never used to have this problem, because you published about someone's conviction say, and when that conviction was spent - you weren't legally obliged to go back to the newspaper archives and delete it. You just assumed that nobody would find it, without serious research.

Once that archive becomes completely transparent and searchable with no effort, then you either have to make people delete all that public facing data (undesirable and probably impossible), give up on the idea of things like rehabilitation and spent convictions (also undesirable) or find a messy compromise.

Google are now a global public utility. That may be tough on them, they didn't ask for it and nobody wants to get regulated by governments all the time. But they established a global search monopoly, and it pays them very well, so that's just tough shit.

It's never going to be posible to regulate millions / billions of individual websites. But Google are huge, make loads of money, and so can get pushed around by government. This can obviously have some seriously bad effects, but then Google getting to decide things to suit themselves can also. There's never going to be a right answer here. Just a series of messy and imperfect compromises.

Amazon to make multiple Lord of the Rings prequel TV series

Re: Running up stairways of falling rocks

Teiwaz,

Spanking you say? Then LotR has already got you covered.

Sauron and Saruman have got whips and dungeons.

And have you not read the chapter, 50 Shades of the Grey Havens?

Brace yourselves, fanboys. Winter is coming. And the iPhone X can't handle the cold

Re: Diversity figures are meaningless without context

the midwife that delivered me (back in 1975) was male.

he was also apparently quite annoyed because I took my time to appear causing him to miss the home game at coventry that afternoon

Very impressive! To have done your first good deed while still in the womb.

Re: Oh dear... but I have a plan!

Just out of interest, when did you dive on Angelina Jolie?

Parity's $280m Ethereum wallet freeze was no accident: It was a hack, claims angry upstart

Re: ...thus setting back blockchain development by years ...

Why invent a conspiracy when you already have so much incompetence?

It's not the blockchain that's been hacked, but the second attack on one company's crappy wallet software.

The banking industry are all over the idea of blockchains at the moment. But international banking have already got pretty low transaction fees sorted, on a much larger scale than Bitcoin, which is apparently now averaging $6 per transaction - and that's not including the larger fees if you wish to use an exhange to convert Bitcoin to real money.

Stop your moaning, says maker of buggy Bluetooth sex toy

Re: This is nonsense

Update 08:50 - [happy face] Ooh look at the pretty glowing lights!

Update 08:51 - [excited face] What does this button do?

Update 08:52 - [confused face] Even more flashing lights and now sirens - what a noisy place!

Update 08:53 - [sad face] Oops.

Update 08:54 - [ad] Nookbook recommends the cancer-curing properties of goji berry extract

Teensy weensy space shuttle flies and lands

Re: The vehicle looks a lot like NASA's Space Shuttle

So do penguins...

The day I almost pinned my tushie as a Google Maps landmark

Re: Pictures!

I'd prefer if it didn't happen...

Re: This is why I keep reading Something for the Weekend, Sir?

Can your pecker do a marathon?

No, but it does snickers...

And, as the advert says, "Get some nuts!"

Although I've now created a very disturbing mental image for myself involving Mr T. I'd go and have a cuppa to recover, but that involves teabagging, which just isn't helping.

The NAKED truth: Why flashing us your nude pics is a good idea – by Facebook's safety boss

Re: WTF???

What's a wombat?

Is it a thing you need to play wom?

Irish priests told to stop bashing bishops

Re: no helpline required

Please note: the only acceptable responses to this post are "Amen" and a repost or link.

What about: Burn the heretic!

Perhaps what they need is lawyers?

Then priests might start getting automated phone calls saying, "Have you been bullied by the baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells? If so, simply press 5 and we can help you with getting compensation. Where there's blame, there's a claim."

Or did they not mean that kind of helpline?

NASA reconfirms 2019 will see first launch of Space Launch System

Re: 2019?

Perhaps we can kill two birds with one stone, and Trump can crew it.

Musk's first flight with Dragon put an orange cheese into orbit, so there's a precedent. Not to mention Ham in the first Mercury capsule...

Brit moron tried buying a car bomb on dark web, posted it to his address. Now he's screwed

Re: Improvised Marketing Term to defend the defence industry.

So what should I look for when buying my explosives online? Are they supposed to be CE marked? Will the electrics have been PAT tested? What are my consumer rights?

That's it! I've had enough of this rip off! I'm writing to Watchdog!

Dear BBC,

I ordered some goods online. And when they were delivered, not only had they exchanged my order for something different, but they'd also informed the police. What are my consumer rights?

Re: Should have bought the How To book off WH Smiths

Anarchists Cookbook review

1 star

Recipes gave me gas, projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhoea.

What's the delivery cost on a Tsar Bomba?

A quick Wiki suggests that it's 27 tonnes - and 8m x 2.1m diameter - so you can't even use the forklift in your garage to unload it off the delivery lorry.

Still, given the cost, I suppose it's not that much more expensive to just buy a lorry and never take it off that until you're ready to use it.

American upstart seeks hotshot guinea pig for Concorde-a-like airliner

Re: I've seen their site. The story does not add up.

Concorde took off on afterburner. It was loud. I used to work under the flightpath - admittedly only a few miles from the runway.

When I say loud, I mean that I couldn't hear myself talking on the phone (let alone the caller) for over a minute, inside a building. Oh and my coffee cup was vibrating - along with everything else...

I'm sure it was much better when cruising.

Better filters won't cure this: YouTube's kids nightmare

Re: When I were a lad...

Can't you just lock your children in a filing cabinet when you're not there? It worked for Chris Morris in Brass Eye...

Also, if you're really lucky, they might grow up to be Hong Kong Phooey.

Lord of the Rings TV show shopped around Hollywood

Re: love-interest for Treebeard

Well the Entwives are long gone. Are there any Entmistresses?

If not, what about Enthookers?

As the Ents have perfected a drink that will make your extremities grow - they can obviously fund their sex and drugs lifestyle by selling penis enlargement pills online. Side effects: When drunk, may cause a stiff neck...

JRR said that Merry and Pippin had got taller, he was perhaps too polite to mention any other effects. OK, I'll get my coat then - the long, dirty mac, obviously.

Re: TV show will probably just be the hobbits farming or eating for 6 hours...

Dropbear,

You sir, are a genius.

An evil genius, mind.

Re: @DougS Wait, the dragons are dead?

Who's going to be the love-interest for Treebeard? That's what I want to know.

Very well done, but this:

butcher up the story they will to try and make it more exciting,

Sounded a bit too much like Yoda...

I was told that Dune series was quite good, and I should look it up. Was that not true?

Shame if so. The film was a big pair of pants - and it would be interesting to see it done well.

I think there's an opportunity for some good writing. The films had the special effects, but some of the writing was pisspoor. They completely dumped any idea of character development - which there is some of in the books - and they left out the good lines they should have nicked from the book, and didn't replace them with anything of note.

Missing out the scouring of the Shire was proof of it. That's a vitally important part of both the story and the character arcs - and it's not as if they didn't have enough time to cover it. Some of those CGI battle sequences were in desperate need of editing down.

Not that I'm saying TV will do any better, but it's always possible. There's been some amazing boxsets in the last 15 years.

Re: Bombadil

Taxes are going to rise,

To save the earth before it dies.

Incomes down down dilli-o,

dilli-o dilli-o di!

You'll pay an extra 2%,

To save the world's environment.

Up up dillio-di

We're all going to pay.

Hooray!

I vote no. We don't want him in politics. I'd almost prefer "I'm going to build a wall and Mordor is going to pay!"

Re: @DougS Wait, the dragons are dead?

How much sex are you planning to crowbar into your excellent new series?

Are we talking a few longing gazes and chase kisses, or are we getting down to some seriously hot hobbit-on-hobbit action?

There's all sorts of opportunities for a bit of S&M. Tolkein is always talking about the whips of Sauron.

And what does Radagast want all those animals for anyway?

Parity calamity! Wallet code bug destroys $280m in Ethereum

Re: A tragedy? @ Messrs Spartacus & Tick

If I might throw another dog or two on the fire, low inflation may be a good thing, negative real interest rates are most certainly not

Mr Anon,

You're a bit hard on the poor old doggies there...

As a general rule you are correct. Negative real interest rates are bad (i.e. interest rates below inflation). This is probably the main cause of the Euro crisis - when French and German inflation and growth were both down around 1-2% in the early 2000s, ECB interest rates were way too low for countries like Ireland and Spain. Causing runaway housing booms - which now means they need lower interest rates than say Germany.

However after the last recession we needed to generate inflation. Yes we needed to generate growth, to get out of recession. But was also needed to generate inflation itself. The reason for this often offends purveyors of the morality-play that Germany has deployed in the Euro-crisis, "poor savers must be protected from inflating away the debts of the feckless". There may even be some justice in that - however it's economically disastrous. As Keynes pointed out. If you have no inflation, then people with debts go bust, and they take the economy with them. That's the disaster of deflation. So the savers (owners of that debt) may complain that they're not getting their full pound of flesh, but what they don't realise is they face a stark choice. Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid. So they're better to accept a bit of inflation eating away at the principal and still getting interest plus repayments - because the alternative is the debtor going bust, and them getting nothing. Once that happens at a national scale, you get a 1930s style depression. So by generating inflation and stopping all the banks going bust, what our central banks did was to pass a bit of pain to the savers so that the borrowers didn't go broke and send the economy into a death-spiral.

Look how it took the Japanese central bank 3 years of insanely massive money-printing and government spending (Abenomics) in order to force their economy to start generating inflation again. Plus all the shorter and less extreme programs of government spending and QE they've done over the last 20 years that failed.

Your second point about deflation in the tech industry seems to be a misunderstanding / confusion of terms.

Deflation in the macro-economic sense means a rising in the value of money. Just as inflation is a fall in the value of money. And it truly is doom-ageddon. Once triggered it generates its own expectations, which cause it to continue. And the way to beat it is economically irrational, so the market can't easily get out of it without massive government intervention.

When you talk about deflation in the computer industry, you're actually talking about productivity rises. Society being able to produce more stuff with the same input of resources, due to new technology, automation and economies of scale. That's the best kind of economic growth.

If that happens in enough industries at once, it might cause deflation in the overall economy - such as in the 1870s - which if vague memories of my 19th C economic history serves, was down to globalisation (in food in particular) causing a long period of wage stagnation lack of investment. Deflation is the enemy of investment, and investment is what tends to fund productivity growth - which is what makes us better off by getting us more stuff for less effort.

Re: A tragedy? @ Richard Boyce

CrazyOldCatMan,

One thing I hadn't realised until seeing a repeat of an old BBC documentary this year was that the Nazis had pulled off a propoganda coup. They got hold of loads of old million Weimar Reichsmark notes and printed election pamphlets on them - which was a brilliantly subtle way of saying the old Weimar democracy is rubbish, why not try our system instead?

I wonder how they got hold of them in quanitity? You'd have thought the central bank would have destroyed them.

Re: And that's why cryptocurrency is not and won't become a replacement for money

You are absolutely correct. There is no way that a bank would stuff up big time and effectively vapourise some eye watering sum of money. And if they did, they'd hardly go cap in hand to Mr add Mrs Tax-Payer for a bailout I guess.

Adam 1,

But that's the point. There's a government to step in and save the day if the shit hits the fan.

If the banks fuck up like that with people's current accounts they can go cap in hand to government to get it sorted out. For a mere couple of hundred million, most banks can just lose it out of their Tier 1 capital and carry on as normal - possibly having to raise a bit of cash on the markets. But if they can't, then the government will step in, and nuke sufficient of their shareholders' and bondholders' equity until the issue is sorted out.

So even after the biggest financial crisis in 80 years, the UK government didn't have to give any money to the banks. The Bank of England lent them loads, truly insane amounts, which was all paid back within 2 years. Those banks in the deepest doodoo had to give the government shares, in exchange for more loans. All but the RBS shares have now been sold at a profit, as have the dead Northern Rock's assets. Now we're just left holding all those shares in RBS - which looks to have finally turned itself around - although I'm not holding my breath on that.

That's why governments are good. They are often annoying, and screw things up, but there are certain levels of protection that their existence can provide - which markets can't. And that's why libertarians are wrong. You can't have functioning markets without functioning governments - for emergency backstop, rule-of-law, protection of contracts and legislation on monopolies.

Re: A tragedy? @ Richard Boyce

It's a specific policy of the government (through the central banks) to constantly make your currency worth less every year, it's called the inflation target which is 2% for the BoE. Not 0%, which would be nice and stable

TheTick,

Just because you are ignorant of economics does mean that all the world's central banks are. Deflation is a much bigger risk to society than inflation. Which is why there is serious economic debate about whether those inflation targets should be raised to around 3%, because undershooting 2% and being around 1% is uncomfortably close to disaster (as the Eurozone has been flirting with for 6 years now).

As a nice example for you, Weimar Germany survived the inflation crisis of 1923, and managed to get the economy back on track. That's apparently the great German folk-memory, of people hauling cash round in wheelbarrows and the evils of inflation.

But it was the banking crisis and deflation after 1930 that triggered the rise of Hitler. Which is what most people seem to forget.

Excessive inflation creates friction and uncertainty and so can damage growth. Deflation makes borrowing almost impossible, which discourages investment and also makes banking dangerously fragile, as well as destroying any business or person carrying pre-existing debts. This creates a vicious cycle of falling growth and investment, failing businesses, unemployment, bank failure and political instability.

So low predictable inflation is a good thing. The only downside is that money is a less good store of value over the long term. But this can be counter-acted by investing that money - either in banks to mostly stave off inflation, or at slightly higher risk to beat it. Both of which investments then make otherwise idle money available for investment, thus further growing the economy.

This is basic economics.

Google on flooding the internet with fake news: Leave us alone, we're trying really hard... *sob*

But Google are editing stuff. That's the whole bloody point. If they put certain searches to the top of the list, then they are selecting criteria to do this in their algorithm design. Which is a human choice, and an act of editing.

More specifically if they promote certain tweets to the top of the page as more relevant, then people have a right to assume that they're more relevant. Because that's what Google meant when they put them there. So they should try to make sure that they get this right, or they should stop doing it.

If Google were just a plain search index, like they used to be, then they'd be in a lot less trouble.

Also, if they (and Facebook and Twitter) took money from a foreign government in order to have some influence on the last US election - they're also responsible for that. Doing that was a decision. As the Facebook chappy said in that Senate hearing last week, we didn't consider that the Russian Government propoganda organisation RT paying us to post adverts on the US election could be a problem until afterwards. I guess that shiny money was just tooooo distracting...

Google make vast profits. They want to select and personalise what people see. In order to increase their profits. And that's fair enough. But if they do so, they need to take responsibility for the consequences.

They also hoover a lot of the advertising revenue up from the traditional news media, by displaying their content - and thus taking users away from those media organisations' websites. Thus they're depriving income to organisations that at least make some serious attempt to fact check. As a society we need the media to do those things. So in the end we either need to pay our media directly to do this (by buying subs or paying taxes), or we need to force Google to hand that cash back, or we need to force Google to take on some of that fact-checking along with that money. Or we dispense with that fact checking, and decide we don't care about democracy.

Splitting off Google Shopping wouldn't fix the pay-to-play problem

Re: Not really

It's not price comparison sites' fault if companies make direct efforts to hide their prices. As a general rule, it also tends to be the more expensive ones that do that - because why would you hide your prices if you were cheaper? So they can still be useful. Imperfect information is better than no information - and just knowing what prices exist in the marketplace is helpful when talking to the companies that hide prices.

Any comparison site who wants to be in the market for a long time will hopefully want a decent reputation, meaning that they're probably going to have to build that rep by showing all results, affiliate link or not. Then use their leverage in the market when they do have volume to persuade sites to give them affiliate links. Anyone willing to pay online advertisers for clicks ought to be willing to pay affiliate links on price comparison sites, where a sale is more likely. It is a problem, but again imperfect information is better than none. And if you know the sites that are cheap but don't pay affiliate links, you can go directly to them to compare.

Your argument seems to be that because it's unlikely a price comparison site can ever be perfect, none should ever exist. And that's just silly.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I think Google still believe they're in the business of providing the best search results, just that they want to keep the advertising monopoly they've built. So if some search-related thing becomes profitable, they'd like to hoover up that cash as well.

Plus, to be fair to them, there's a lot of shit search out there too. Try looking for a hotel's own website, and probably the first few links will be hotel search/booking sites.

So I think Google want all the cash, and all the control. Obviously this is in pursuit of getting filthy rich, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It does display a certain arrogance, but then they do have quite a bit to be arrogant about. It also shows a complete lack of respect for competition law, but then we know from experience that they have no respect for privacy law either.

I imagine Google's wet dream is that you could do a search for hotels with a pool in Mediterranean seaside cities in the first week of October costing less than £350 - that also have flights available for under £200. But we still seem to be quite a long way from that kind of intelligent and very complex search.